By the time Howard Schultz had resigned from Starbucks in 2000, the coffee chain was experiencing steady growth. Eight years later, when Starbucks was reeling from a bad economy and ...

In his book, Break Open the Sky, Steven Bauman writes:

Despite our near-phobic fear of failure, the facts suggest that it's actually a common, almost universal, experience:

• 75 percent of venture-capital-backed start-ups fail, and 95 percent do not meet the initial expectations.